Thursday, 27 August 2009

Saved by Science (NHM) Photo Series

I'm now six installments into a twitter photo series I've been calling "Saved by Science (NHM)" and I've decided I'm enjoying myself enough to warrant formalizing it a bit more.

It all started when I was browsing SEED magazine's special Darwin bicentenary collection (as a professional Darwin groupie is wont to do) and saw a link to an article by Carl Zimmer called 'The Awe of Natural History Collections'. I clicked it (as an Natural History Museum employee is wont to do) and was immediately enthralled, from the subtitle--'visiting the hidden side of natural history museums, where the vast collections of scientific specimens are kept'--through to the end. It's a real Zimmer gem, if you ask me.

Anyways, the article links to an audio slide show by Justine Cooper called "Saved by Science". It's not your average window-dressing to an article, it absolutely steals the show. And considering how good Carl Zimmer's writing is, that's really saying something. It's a brilliant piece of stand-alone journalism. Some of the slides are astonishingly intimate and poignant. Go there now and watch (and listen to) the whole thing.

I was immediately struck by the familiarity of the photographs. They were so similar to scenes I'd witnessed myself at the Natural History Museum in London, where I work. And then I realized that there was a communication void just waiting to be filled; I realized that I really should start taking candid behind-the-scenes photos at 'my' museum along the same lines as Justine Cooper's photos of AMNH.

And so began "Saved by Science (NHM)", a series of tweets (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...) with my Cooperesque NHM photos attached as twitpics. Of course, my photos are usually taken with my iPhone, not a large-format camera, and of course they're not nearly as good as Cooper's, but the point is to reveal the hidden side of the Natural History Museum to a wider audience.

To keep up on my series you can follow me on twitter, but as twitter is a pretty ephemeral thing, and as not everyone tweets (I know--shocking), and as I'd hate for the series to get lost in that ever-growing graveyard of old, unarchived tweets, I've created a permanent archive on my website.

2 comments:

I've got a dslr too, though I don't use it nearly as well as you do yours! But the thing is, this relies on me randomly stumbling across photo opportunities as I go through my work day. How about this, after a few months, I do a poll to pick the top 20 image subjects and then I'll invite you in to repeat them w/ your dslr.

About Data Not Shown

After about a year of blogging over at The Beagle Project Blog, I realised there were certain things I wanted to write about that might be considered a leeeetle too opinionated or off-topic to warrant posting there. See, The Beagle Project is a team effort, and I had the growing worry that with certain posts I might be infecting the others (and the project as a whole) with Karen cooties. So, while I still consider The Beagle Project Blog my primary blogspot, the views expressed over here at Data Not Shown are mine ...my own ...my precious. You can learn more about Data Not Shown, including an explanation of the title, in my inaugural post.